


His own image walking in the garden

by Anonymous



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, buttchins, feuilly's incredible buttchin, feuilly's seductive buttchin, grantaire my god idk grantaire, grantaire thinks you should all name your horses better, sorry shelley, the point of this story is to give feuilly a buttchin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 08:10:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1420963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire and Feuilly walk home together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His own image walking in the garden

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mad_Max](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/gifts).



“You know from best to worst, bloodlines are cluttered with horses named Bucephalus,” said Grantaire, with a sideways look at Enjolras, who ignored him. “One tries to place a bet on a race and the Bucephalii are numbered, Père through Fils through Bucephalus XIV. Bucephalus the Great, Bucephalus the Impaler and Bucephalus the Unready.  _Bousse-_ ephalus. Bucetcetera.”

“When I was a lad, I called my horse Rocinante,” said Courfeyrac, because Grantaire, whose parents were of a suburban accounting class, had not owned a horse as a boy and seemed to painfully run aground on the subject. “ _Rocinante, le Roussin_ , for even then I was clever."

“Or something,” said Prouvaire, in such a quiet voice that Joly had to lean in to catch the rest: “Mine was Llamrei."

“Rather a mouthful,” Joly mumbled with dismissive skepticism, after he had made Prouvaire repeat it. (“Rather a mouthful, he says,” Bahorel snickered, elbowing Joly hard under the ribs. “Rather a  _mouthful_ , honestly, my dear  _fellow._ ”)

“If she had been a stallion I would have used Hengroen,” Prouvaire said with as much easy contentment as he had said the original horse’s name.

“Putting that aside,” said Courfeyrac. “We were saying, about the printing costs.”

Here Bossuet and Joly brought out an index of prices they had managed to have promised to them, and Bossuet fixed the sheet to the table with a wineglass.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” said Feuilly to Grantaire. “Naming a horse. Probably the color. Or a prominent habit. Biting, possibly.”

“It’s much easier to choose a historical or legendary horse,” Grantaire told him. “I recommend Bucephalus.”

Feuilly laughed. “You don’t. Anyway, I will never have the task, which is good, for I would hate to see what embarrassment looks like on a horse.”

Grantaire found himself laughing when he pictured it.

 

* * *

  

At the end of the evening, Grantaire left with Feuilly.

“At least no one needs a horse in the city,” said Grantaire. They both lived close by, and it was a short walk they rarely took together.

The sky was not entirely dark but the lamplighters had been early; it was the beginning of spring and there were enough clouds in the sky to make the pallid night a neoclassical one.

Behind the coil of streets Grantaire imagined shadows, recalled to the shapes of their chimeras at Notre-Dame. And up at the cemetery of Père Lachaise, moonlight on the gate and brightening the inscriptions. He could recall that on the left side was,  _spes illorum immortalitate plena est._  It had been on his mind.

The Seine shivered under a light wind. A beautiful night, when he pictured it, and then sought to distract himself with his company.

The effects of warm and cool light mixed on Feuilly with a pleasing but not wholly flattering serenity of contrast. Like Piero’s Resurrection but not at dawn. The opposing directions of light deepened the space under Feuilly’s brows, and darkened the seam in his chin which ran to just below his lower lip. It was an interesting feature; in fact it was one that seemed to stupefy women magnificently; Grantaire had seen it happen. He touched a pair of fingers to his own chin, which was coarse from a long day but made in a typical and pointed shape. Not a classical feature, not distinct to Paris but nevertheless the local standard.

Feuilly was an uncommon person, not only for the strong and symmetrical character of his features, but his manner in general, and Grantaire felt affection for him. With someone like Prouvaire he would act decisively and invite him in.

But Feuilly, who had risen before the sun and worked a long day after, was determined to get home, and would never abandon his shield for something so whimsical.

This was one of the symptoms he had observed before; stupefaction. The chin, probably, had snuck up on him.

“A peaceful night,” he said aloud.

“A desolation,” Feuilly said, not in agreement.

“Well, I don’t mind the odd synonym. Here and there. And I do like the weather.”

“Empire has no synonyms,” said Feuilly, and Grantaire wondered if he thought like this all the time. For his own part, as the day began and ended he could be anyone; he had no history. The century did not matter, he was not thinking of politics, only the immortal formless thoughts of the human mind alone.  _It is cold_ ,  _my name is this, those are the bells ringing from Les Invalides. The time is later than I expected, it seems likely to rain, I am hungry, one day my father will be gone, and my mother, and then it is my turn, my own company is pleasant at the moment but I am afraid to die if it is alone._

He felt somewhat resentfully that it went differently for Feuilly, due chiefly to strength of mind and discipline. Grantaire’s friends were all fanatics of a similar shade; Feuilly and Combeferre were the most opaque.

He thought again of the shadows whispering on the river and the dark rose windows of Notre-Dame, beauty with strangeness in the proportions. Life was a brutal experience but he would not voluntarily be parted with these things, from their details to their silhouettes, at his soul he was still in awe of all of it. These things they misname empire. From Alexander to Tacitus, not one of them had seen Paris in the spring of 1832.

“My street,” said Grantaire, when they came to it. Feuilly bid him goodnight, and he promised kindly to continue their discussion soon.

When he arrived upstairs, Grantaire stood at his window until it was fully dark. He thought,  _the time is later than expected,_ and then the bells rang out from Les Invalides. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Title from Prometheus Unbound wow I am a really successfully anonymous anon. "Ere Babylon was dust,  
> The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,  
> Met his own image walking in the garden.  
> That apparition, sole of men, he saw.  
> For know there are two worlds of life and death..."
> 
> 2\. Rocinante is Don Quixote's horse. Llamrei and Hengroen were King Arthur's horses. I mean maybe they were, I wasn't there. Prouvaire what a giant nerd. 
> 
> 3\. Buttchin buttchin buttttttchinnnnn r u glad u clicked
> 
> 4\. "Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." how do you like THAT i threw down some tacitus wow being anon is really freeing
> 
>  
> 
> 5\. buttchin buttchin anon OUT


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